Thursday, April 4, 2013

It seems like a weird oversight that a resurgence of sleeve garters hasn't accompanied that of collar tips (which, I'll have it noted for the record, I picked up on ages before the trend happened. Dick yeah!) and the massive shirt trend in general. Here's Robert Redford wearing some in The Sting (made in 1973 but set during the 1930s):

Be warned - the sleeve garter is not without its detractors. Writing in the Perth Sunday Times on May 26, 1940, the writer Richard Hughes (using the pen name "Dr Watson"), made particular mention of this unusual accessory. Regarding the victims of "Australia's Last Bushrangers," Patrick and James Kenniff, Hughes wrote:

If P.C. Doyle hadn’t worn a pair of shirt-sleeve garters to keep his cuffs at a fashionable length, and if he hadn’t been so effeminate as to carry a bar of soap… the charred and pounded remains of the two corpses would not satisfactorily have been identified as Doyle and Dahlke.

Wait, maybe that is an endorsement for sleeve garters? I'm also not sure if he's being tongue-in-cheek about the soap thing, but I suspect he was a nothing-in-cheek kinda guy.

And while we're on it, how grand is this ad for calculators from the November 6, 1952 edition of the Brisbane Courier-Mail?

Someone should let Contex know that the gay 90s are totally having a revival moment.